The revival meetin' is an orgie of the soul, a spiritual debaucha dropping from sane and sensible control into eroticism.

There may also be traces of that "longing for an ennobling of the passion of love" of which Rohde speaks (though I have not found any in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favorite usage, gives no references); but apart from that, the later Greek literature differs from the older not in being purer, but by its coarse and shameless eroticism, both unnatural and natural.

[250] These lines by their fervid eroticism quite suggest the existence of a masculine Indian Sappho.

It is possible to argue that eroticism and religion are so nearly allied and so easily mistaken for one another, that safety and sincerity alike demand separate worship for men and women.[F]

But it is not possible, on grounds of religious eroticism, to protect men from listening to a woman preaching, at the cost of compelling women to listen to no one but a man; or insist on the intolerable cruelty of compelling a man-priest to celebrate mass with a woman server, while forcing the woman to make her confession to a man.

I am convinced that when religious people learn to refrain from cheap "religion" based on emotional preaching and sentimental or rowdy music, they will find that, though eroticism and religion are nearly allied and can easily be mistaken, it is not impossible to distinguish between them.

There will then be less of that eroticism in religion which some of those whoby a curious perversion of logicoppose the ministry of women actually quote as a reason for compelling women to go to men-priests because there is no one else for them to go to.

In this insensate and pitiless image, in this innocent and dangerous idol, the eroticism and terror of mankind were depicted.